THEATER: MATILDA
I have a new favorite musical and it’s called MATILDA THE MUSICAL!!! This literate, darkly funny, empowering, and bizarrely inventive Tony award-winner just hit the Boston Opera House in its first national tour– and don’t you dare miss it! MATILDA THE MUSICAL is based on Roald Dahl’s best-selling novel, and captures the writer’s strange and shadowy sensibility, as does the kooky choreography, the eerily beautiful sets, and this wondrous score propelled by the eccentrically elaborate rhymes of a first class lyricist.
The author of such odd and delightful children’s classics as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach” here relates the story of an emotionally orphaned little girl who must use her talents to overturn the cruel hand she has been dealt. Matilda is a genius, a bookish child born to parents who happen to be nasty money-grubbing ignoramuses–and who wanted a boy. The astounding Lily Brooks O’Briant played the Matilda the night I saw it, and held the stage from start to finish with the coolest sangfroid in the face of the sadistic onslaught of her idiot parents. She made me cry, and laugh at her absolutely relentless determination to be herself, and never give in. She didn’t crack a smile until the curtain call!! Darcy Stewart and Brandon McGibbon are vivaciously vulgar as Matilda’s parents the smarmy Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood.
Matilda is routinely castigated for everything she says and does including reading books! It gets worse when she’s packed off to the “Crunchem School” run by the largest, meanest head mistress, Miss Trunchbull who looks just like her name sounds; she’s a bully who refers to the children as “maggots” and hales from the “To teach the child we must break the child” school of instruction. David Abeles is brilliant in the part, hairy-legged and big-bosomed, crowned with a mean little bun pulled samurai tight atop an ax-like face. He managed to scare the bejesus out of me even as I laughed out loud at his outlandish wickedness.
The book takes an unexpected twist and features a peculiar and bittersweet story within a story, within a story involving Matilda’s kindly teacher named Miss Honey (of course) sung by the sweet-voiced Paula Brancati. This melancholy plot strand curls itself around Matilda and gives the tale a whiff of the otherworldly, and a dose of cockeyed logic that feels altogether and oddly– just right.
The supporting ensemble of children were astonishingly distinctive as individual performers, energized with an almost manic frenzy, flying about the stage (once by the pigtails!) tumbling, swinging, whipping themselves from one number to the next until the second act arrives and all hell breaks loose. It was then that the show achieved a king of euphoria when one hapless child (Ryan Christopher Dever) who had been forced to consume an entire chocolate cake, rebels in a triumphant number featuring a cavalcade of dance moves, and championing all of us who were ever out of sync or didn’t fit the mold, and who are suffocating under the weight of the repressive status quo. whew.
Kids will LOVE this. I loved this. You will love this. See MATILDA THE MUSICAL at the Boston Opera House presented by Broadway in Boston through June 26!